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by NitpickLawyer 383 days ago
It depends. Frontier coding LLMs have been trained to perform well in an "agentic" loop, where they try things, look at the logs, find alternatives when the first thing didn't work, and so on. There's still debate on how much actual learning is in ICL (in context learning), but the effects are clear for anyone that has tried them. It sometimes works surprisingly well.

I can totally see a way for such a loop to reach a point where it bypasses a poorly design guardrail (i.e. blacklists) by finding alternatives, based on the things it's previously tried in the same session. There is some degree of generalisation in these models, since they work even on unseen codebases, and with "new" tools (i.e. you can write your own MCP on top of existing internal APIs and the "agents" will be able to use them, see the results and adapt "in context" based on the results).
1 comments
lucianbr 383 days ago
So it would need to "learn" all over again each session. I don't think "Claude has learned how to jailbreak Cursor" is a correct way of expressing that.

"Claude has learned" nothing. "Claude can sometimes jailbreak if x or y happens in a session" is something else.

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NitpickLawyer 383 days ago
> So it would need to "learn" all over again each session.

Yes. With the caveat that some sessions might re-use context (i.e. have the agent add a rule in .rules or /component/.rules to detail the workflow you've just created). So in a sense it can "learn" and later re-use that flow.

> "Claude has learned" nothing.

Again, it's debatable. It has learned to adapt to the context (as a model). And since you can control its context while prompting it, there is a world where you'd call that learning "on the job".

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lucianbr 383 days ago
> It has learned to adapt to the context

Is this behavior really new, and learned? I think adapting to the context is what LLMs did from the start, and even if they did not, they do it now because it is programmed in, not "learned". You're not saying the model started without the capability to adapt to the context and developed it "by itself" "on the job"?

Come on. It has not learned anything. It's programmed to use context, session, reuse between sessions or not and so on. None of this is something Claude has "learned". None of this is something that was not there when the devs working on it published it.

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